1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a preheating control system and a control method thereof. More particularly, the present invention relates to a preheating control system of an information processing device and a control method thereof.
2. Related Art
Information processing device must operate in a certain temperature scope, so as to assure operating accuracy thereof. Sometimes, the information processing device must operate under a low temperature environment, for example, a military or industrial computer, so before the information processing device is booted, it is necessary to maintain the internal of the information processing device in a normal operating temperature scope. Particularly, a hard disk mostly can only operate under the environment with a temperature higher than 0°, and if the temperature is lower than 0°, a risk of data loss may be resulted. For the recent method, an embedded controller (EC) can be used to output a heating control signal before the information processing device finishes a boot program, and a heating and control unit coupled to the EC is used to heat at least one internal device (e.g., the hard disk) of the information processing device according to whether the heating control signal can be enabled or not, such that the information processing device still can normally be booted and operate under the low temperature environment.
Although the EC can normally operate under the low temperature environment, when the environmental temperature is lower than a certain specific value, for example lower than −20°, the EC may be in an unstable state, such that a part of the functions cannot be normally executed. Additionally, when the EC is in the normal operation situation (that is, the information processing device is not booted, and the EC performs the preheating control procedure), the EC has a certain power consumption (mostly and approximately being 30 mA). Therefore, for a portable electronic device, the power consumption of the EC is one of the reasons affecting cell endurance ability.